


the shape of things to come

by hydrospanners



Series: renegade [1]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Backstory, Drabble, Gen, Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-23 06:48:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14326899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: Nirea Velaran is sixteen when a betrayal leaves her family dead and her life in tatters. She and her brother are offered a choice: enter the welfare system and be separated, or join the Jedi together. Rhese chooses the Jedi, and where her brother goes, Nirea will always follow.





	the shape of things to come

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr.

A few hours of sullen silence is all Rea can manage before the question spills out. (Deerin always said she talked too much.)  
  
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?”  
  
Marefka doesn’t have to ask who she means. “I’m afraid so, child.”  
  
She felt Ranna and Qarric. She can still feel it if she lets herself, echoes of a pain that’s sharp and hot and sudden and then just gone. A yawning emptiness where they ought to be. But Liss and Daeleth… She hadn’t felt them die. They could have gotten away.

Couldn’t they?  
  
“They wanted me to run,” Rea says, not sure why she’s talking about this with her new jailer. “They found me in that tunnel and they wanted me to run.”  
  
“Some people are not made to run.”  
  
It’s annoying that this Jedi thinks she knows Rea. Like a few interviews in a jail cell laid all her secrets bare.

“I’ve run before,” Rea declares, mostly out of defiance. She remembers the feel of Deerin’s familiar, haggard face under her fist, the crunch of his bones and the spray of hot blood. She remembers how his head cracked against the permacrete, how the sound of it echoed through the tube. She remembers how Rhese’s fingers clawed at her arms, how he begged her to stop. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know what that bastard did. “I could’ve run.”  
  
“Why didn’t you?”

That traitorous son of a bitch had pleaded with her. He’d begged and begged and begged.   
  
Rea looks at her hands, at the smooth, unbroken skin of her knuckles and the clean, white nails. She remembers them covered in blood, remembers split skin and bits of red flesh buried beneath her nails. “I was going to kill him,” she admits. “I wanted to kill him.” She looks into Marefka’s face, into her unflinching grey eyes and swallows. “I guess I did kill him.”  
  
“You did,” her new master agrees. She says it so easily, so simply. Like they’re talking about the weather and not a man’s life. “That will stay with you, Padawan.”  
  
She wants it to. She wants to remember the feel of him slipping away, wants to remember the fear in his eyes as she beat the life out of his. She wants to remember how her blood burned, how her heart screamed. She wants to remember–-  
  
She wants to remember Rhese. She wants to remember the way he cried, how her name sounded between his sobs. She wants to remember the fear in his eyes, the moment her brother looked at her and saw a monster in her skin.  
  
“I’m not sorry he’s dead.”

"No,” Marefka agrees, calm as stone. “But you are sorry you killed him.”  
  
Rea looks to her hands again, and she can almost feel Rhese’s fingers on her arm, tugging. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what Deerin did.  
  
“We should’ve run. We should’ve stayed together.” Ranna always said the only way they could survive was as a family. How could she be so right about something, and so wrong at the same time? It was her family that killed her. It was her family that might’ve saved Rea's brother. “Rhese shouldn’t have had to see me do it. I should’ve made sure he was safe.”  
  
“Protecting innocence should always come before punishing evil,” Marefka says, doing that thing again where she takes common sense and makes it sound like some self-righteous Jedi banthashit.   
  
Rea just shrugs and stares out the window. The city she knows so well rushes past, a blur of steel and smoke, going on as if today was no different than yesterday. As if the landscape had not fundamentally shifted beneath her feet. Corellia could be an unfeeling place, but the sameness of it was almost a comfort.  
  
Nirea didn’t want to leave it.

“You’re right,” she agrees, thinking of the pretenders in their ill-fitting CorSec uniforms, their blasters pointed at her aunt’s head. “Protection first. Cause you can always go back and kill the bastards later.”  
  
Marefka doesn’t flinch. She only looks at Rea from the corner of her eyes, green face placid as an Alderaanian lake. Perfect fucking Jedi stoicism. “You have much yet to learn, Padawan.”  
  
Rea decides then that she won’t. She will stay with this woman as long as she has to to watch over Rhese, but she isn’t going to hear her lessons or take her advice. She isn’t going to be a proper Jedi. Not now. Not ever.  
  
Nirea Velaran is many things. Refugee. Orphan. Outlaw. (Murderer.) She’s a scrapper and a pilot and a juvenile delinquent. She is Corellian to the bone.   
  
But she will never–- _never_ –-be a Jedi.


End file.
